Based on a real-life encounter with a UFO, “Cloud Hotel” is an puzzling but ultimately illuminating story about being lost and being found.
Written and illustrated by Julian Hanshaw
Remco knows he is special. He was chosen. God took a shine to him, after a bright light in a clear northern sky brought Remco to the incredible Cloud Hotel, a wondrous place that he never wants to leave. But Remco has outstayed his welcome… and it’s time to check out.
LA Times Book Prize finalist Julian Hanshaw (Tim Ginger) returns with another feast of visual imagination and emotional intensity that will haunt readers’ dreams long after the book is closed.
There’s something about the aesthetic of this book that just draws the eye. The backgrounds more so than the characters, which is in itself fascinating, right off the bat. With clear lines and an abundance of scene setting-details (especially wallpaper – you won’t soon forget the wallpaper) Hanshaw creates a pocket dimension that would be as welcome in one of Terry Gilliam’s daydreams as it would be in an episode of Twin Peaks. I’m talking, of course, about the Cloud Hotel itself – a place our main character, Remco, comes and goes from in the years following his abduction.
Okay, that’s a lot to parse, and in the first few pages especially this is one puzzling book, with fitful dialogue and awkwardly truncated scenes giving the impression you’re reading excerpts from some larger, much more complicated work. But as you get into it, “Cloud Hotel” starts to cohere, sketching broader themes about loss and self-determination.
In essence, young people have been going missing from the English countryside, and they all wind up in the Cloud Hotel. They stay there until the phone rings, and then they’re gone from the hotel forever. Only Remco can come and go as he pleases, and it’s unclear why. Then there’s Emma, a long-term resident of the hotel, for whom the phone has yet to ring. After a while it’s just the two of them in the hotel, and as the entire place begins to crumble, they form an uneasy friendship.
They’re both weird kids, with tendencies toward odd observations and fixating on details, and their dialogue is tangled and disjointed – they almost always wind up speaking past each other. It’s heavily implied that they’re going to have to work together somehow to get out of the hotel’s grasp, but how exactly that can come to be is the main mystery of the book.
Further complicating things is that Remco sees the place as a refuge. It’s hard to blame him; his real life is full of darkness, from his ailing grandfather to his troubled parents. His exploration of the hotel – and the way he embraces its unusual facets – starts to feel like a survival tactic, as though the only way through is inward.
Throughout, Hanshaw’s use of colour is intriguing – from drab tones for the real world, to pastels for the Cloud Hotel, to vibrant pop-art shades during a celestial encounter at the book’s close (probably the book’s best visual moment overall). But nothing sets off the use of colour better than the bit of wallpaper Remco steals from the hotel and brings home; its orange seems otherwordly in all the grey and blue.
Maybe it’s because Dave McKean blurbed the book, but I can’t help thinking of him when I look over the round, wan, and vaguely alien faces of the characters. They’re even a little samey until you get to know them, with dark circles around their eyes and similar jawlines. In the end it’s the story itself – and the storytelling, with Hanshaw’s versatile layouts doing a lot of heavy lifting – that gets us feeling for the characters.
By way of example, one of the most interesting sequences – where Remco manages to glimpse Emma’s mind by looking through a book in the hotel library – is almost abstract. Golden lines skitter across the page like half-formed thoughts, squiggling in and out of coherence. The sequence imparts all the more visual range to the book, and it’s also a neat storytelling trick, getting us quite literally inside the heads of the characters.
“Cloud Hotel” is full of remarkable stuff, and yet it’s hard to recommend wholeheartedly – it’s such an odd thing, and sorrowful down at its core, although its concluding message is hopeful. It also takes an active reader, parsing through the somewhat disjointed scenes and cutting through to the emotion running underneath.
It’s an unusual read but a memorable one, and with its elliptical nature and use of aliens as a metaphor for the unknown, “Cloud Hotel” even makes a nice companion piece to “The Interview”. If you get ahold of both of them, you’re guaranteed a weird weekend – a close encounter of the introspective kind.
